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Arcanists
Arcanists is a turn-based strategy game. Players take turns to utilise one of sixteen spells, chosen by the player beforehand, in order to defeat their opponents. Members have many more spells, clothing and abilities than free players. Arcanists can also be played at www.arcanists.com, although account management and server switching is still done via the main FunOrb site. Gameplay Basics You play as a wizard who can deploy various spells, most of which deal damage, protect you, or summon minions which you can then command. Each player starts with 250 health and, unless they have used a special ability (Soul Jar), will die when it hits zero. After the player dies, he/she may still spectate the game. After each player has had 60 turns, the game will automatically draw, saying the game was out of time. Some players stall in order for this to happen. Playing the tutorial will help you to get the hang of movement, aiming, and firing, and is recommended before joining a multiplayer game. It is worth noting that you can customise your spell book: non-members, new players, and new members won't have access to the full range of spells, but can still benefit from examining the options available. You can also customise your appearance and unlock more clothing items by completing achievements or purchasing them with orb coins on the Orb Downloads section of the FunOrb website. Movement and Direction All of the basic movement actions have alternative keys. Note that these vary between the localised FunOrb sites, as assumptions are made about the keyboard layouts players on each site will be using. This table documents the keys for the English-language version: The mouse is used to target and fire most weapons. The cursor keys are used to look around the battlefield, although this will cause the camera to stop automatically following the active player or minion. On your turn N and C will loop through your team's minions and your Arcanist; on someone else's turn, N and C will centre on the active player and return the camera to auto-follow mode. Pressing Q on your turn will skip the current go and move on to the next player without you doing any action. Under certain circumstances, you may find yourself with the ability to fly, or controlling a flying minion. In this case high jump becomes movement upwards, and long jump becomes movement downwards. If your Arcanist has mounted a minion, you have to control the minion rather than the Arcanist. Something important that you must remember is that you cannot attack while mounted on a minion, you can attack but any attack WILL hit the minion, even a bomb will get stuck on it. Sometimes, it can be difficult to jump from one location to the next if your character is facing the wrong way, as turning around may mean you fall from where you are standing. To change direction without moving, choose a weapon and target it in the direction you wish to face. Spells Maps Arcanists features 9 distinct maps to fight in: one for beginners, and one each for every spellbook except Seas and Cogs. All the maps except Grassy Hills contain an Armageddon spell that starts firing and continues firing from both sides of the map while slowly converging inwards after all the players have moved 10 times. Game Modes There are two styles of game: team and free-for-all (FFA). A team game requires an even number of players: the top half of the list of players form the red team and the bottom half form the blue team. The host of an unrated game cannot start a team game with an odd number of players. In rated games, however, the teams are divided by who waits the longest and shortest for the game to start. Although nothing prevents people from forming informal teams in an FFA game, the handling of turn order between the two styles has an important difference. In FFA the turn cycles through the players, but in team games it alternates between the teams and so offsets a lot of the advantage which would otherwise be gained by eliminating a player from the opposing team. In a 2 v. 2 team game, if one person dies, their teammate gets double turns to even the difference. In a 3 v. 3 team game, if two people of the same team die, their surviving teammate gets triple turns. Rating Awards At the end of a game, certain awards are given out to the players who did certain things during the match. In a rated game, players who get awards usually get wands; however the number of wands gained seems to vary greatly. It may depend on you, your team's, and your opponents' ratings; how many awards you each received; and whether or not the average rating of the game is less than the level for your prestige hat. As a general rule, more awards are given in games with multiple opponents and many turns. Note that the meaning of the awards has not been officially published, and so is intelligent speculation for the most part. Wands Wands are like a form of currency in Arcanists, and they can be used to buy spells at a rate of 5 wands to unlock a spell book (gaining all its level 1 spells) and 2 or 3 respectively for level 2 and level 3 spells. Like rating, they can be gained only in rated games, and so are available only to members. They are gained by winning or by achieving awards. However, players with prestige hats can only win wands while the match's average rating is above a certain number, and players who leave the game before the end will not only lose rating but also fail to receive their wands. Prestige Hats Prestige hats are an optional series of icons which players can earn after purchasing all spells (or getting enough wands that would allow them to do so). The spells are traded in for a prestige hat, and the player is left with the initial spell sets (most of the arcane and flame books) and the Book of Cogs, which is only unlocked by obtaining a prestige hat. They have to repurchase the lost spells with more wands. Each Prestige hat makes gaining wands more difficult. To make sure players don't accidentally buy prestige hats and lose all their spells, you must hold 'CTRL' and then click the buy button (right) before you can actually buy the hat. Gaining the first five prestige hats will unlock the Lord of Wands achievement. Gaining all ten prestige hats takes time and persistence but is a huge milestone, and gives you the Wand Hoarder achievement. Below is a chart showing the average game rating needed to gain wands at the normal rate. For example: If you have the fifth prestige hat, you don't need 1250 rating to gain the normal wand rate, instead the average of all players' rating in the game needs to be equal to or greater than 1250. This means that if you're fighting someone with a rating of 100 and your rating is 1600 you would not get the normal wand rate if you win because the average of 100 and 1600 is only 850 but if you're fighting someone with a rating of 1050 and your rating is 1600 you would get the normal wand rate because the average of 1050 and 1600 is 1325. *In total it takes 153 wands to buy a prestige hat, meaning it will take 1.530 wands to buy all prestige hats, and 1.683 wands to earn all prestige hats and all spells. *You will NOT gain any more wands if you have bought all the spells, unless you buy another prestige hat. Achievements Events *During the 2008 Christmas season, the Grassy Hills theme was covered with snow, with castles and trees having Christmas decorations. *During the 2009 Halloween season, the Mos Le' Harmless stage had the monkeys dropping from the first turn as zombies that shot thorn bombs, which were affected by the nature familiar. *On 5th August 2010, the first f2p achievements (15 of them) aside from "mark of fame" were released in an update alongside 17+ members-only achievements (and one hidden members-only achievement). Trivia *Arcanists is currently the on FunOrb, and has for a long time remained such. Only for a short period of time was it passed by Armies of Gielinor. *Arcanists was voted players' favourite FunOrb game in a RuneScape Poll. *Once a player has played 500 games the ratings menu will no longer accurately count; it will instead say 500+. *The Arch mage achievement was previously obtained by achieving a ranking of 5000 after winning 50 rated games, but it has now been lowered to 4000 because Jagex felt that a 5000 rating was too hard for even some of the best legitimate Arcanists players to get (and as a result the previous requirement of 5000 rating encouraged illegal transferring of rating). *The flame familiar Harpy flame graphics are reused from the Wizard Run Harpy king boss. *The Cuckoo clock spell sound is reused from Torquing! collecting hourglass power-up. *The Block out the sun achievement is a reference (possibly indirectly through reference to a modern adaptation) to an incident mentioned by Herodotus in the context of the Battle of Thermopylae, or a line in the movie 300. *On Mos Le'Harmless, you can make your monkey minions fall off without using a spell. Bring one of the monkeys to the edge of the stage, put the other monkey on top as close to the edge as possible, and simply move the bottom monkey away from the edge to make the top one fall. Normally the monkeys cannot be walked off into the water. *The Frost Giant's appearance may be a reference to Marvin the robot from the film version of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. *If you try to Zombify a paladin, you will get a dark knight instead of a zombie paladin. *You can get 6250 hp by playing in a 6 player match as a lich and zombify everyone's minions and use the dark defence to give them the damage, meaning that no spell can actualy kill YOU while the minions are alive, but doing this would be close to impossible as you'd have to hide 24 creatures. de:Arkanistenfr:Arcanistesnl:Arcanists __NOWYSIWYG__ Category:Multi-player Games Category:Original Games Category:Strategy Games Category:Arcanists Category:All Games Category:Games with achievements with duplicate names